Part 7 Reasons to upgrade from FM 7.x to FM 10: Book building

Book building capabilities for managing multiple project assets (chapters, document content) were one of the prime drivers for many users moving to FrameMaker 7.x ten years ago. Ironically, the powers associated with this feature have increased exponentially with recent releases. For anyone who has to manage multiple chapters in various stages of approval, enhanced hierarchical book features in FrameMaker 10 could be reason alone to justify an upgrade from FrameMaker 7.x

Book building in FrameMaker 7.x

Although powerful for its day, ten years ago, FrameMaker 7.x could basically create a “flat” book structure. Books could contain chapters with a virtually unlimited total page count, as well as generated files like Tables of Contents, Indices, Glossaries and more.

Early book building in FrameMaker 7.x was made even more powerful by the fact that all generated entries (e.g. Table of Contents of Index listing) were automatically hyperlinked back to the source text, both in FrameMaker and in generated PDF files.

Books in FrameMaker 7.x have two main limitations compared to FrameMaker 10 books: (a) lack of hierarchy (e.g. sub-books, folders and groups) and (b) a limitation in structured FrameMaker that requires documents to be in the proprietary, binary *.fm format.

The screen capture below shows the limited options presented in the “Add” menu for a FrameMaker 7.2 book.

Basically the choices are to add another document, or various types of generated files. The screen capture below shows how the “Add” function has been expanded in recent releases to allow FrameMaker 10 users to also add Folders or Groups to a book.

FrameMaker 10 books with hierarchy

Folders and groups (as well as books within books) enable FrameMaker 10 users to add a “DITA-like” hierarchy to an unstructured project. This essentially makes some degree of topic-based authoring possible with unstructured FrameMaker content before a user decides to migrate into pure DITA or XML via FrameMaker 10.

Documents contained in Folders or Groups within books may be indented to create temporary or permanent substructure. You can regard a folder as a section of sub-section within a book file. It is possible to set special numbering styles for a folder and all of its contents. You can also choose to temporarily exclude files from being published by selecting Exclude from a right mouse exclude menu.

Users may wish to create temporary substructure via book folders that are temporarily excluded from publishing while folder content is considered to be “unapproved” or in the “draft” stage. The ability to temporarily exclude content can be particularly useful for training materials or beta documentation that is undergoing frequent edits and revisions. The screen capture to the right shows a FrameMaker 10 book with folder substructure indented at various levels. Folders and which have been selected for exclusion from publishing are indicated in red.

Incidentally, many FrameMaker 10 users haven’t discovered Groups, which act as placeholders empowering them to insert clusters of remote documents within a book. You cannot modify documents in groups within your book; you must visit the original location of the source files.

Structured books in FrameMaker 7.x

FrameMaker 7.x had a fairly powerful structured XML or DITA capability for its day, although it was limited to composite documents in proprietary FrameMaker books. The screen capture below shows a structured FrameMaker 7.x book, with the selected book’s structure displayed in the Structure View. The green circle indicates chapter file suffixes, which reveal that all documents are saved in proprietary *.fm file format.

This limitation of structured (e.g. “DITA”) chapters having to be in binary format was long a major criticism of older versions of FrameMaker; this limitation was corrected several years ago. With FrameMaker 7.x, structured chapters contained a copy of the EDD (Element Definition Document) as well as the template, which defined the documents’ inherent structure. Guided editing was provided by the rules of the EDD through the Structure View. But, it was possible for “creative” publishers to use old, “unstructured” pull-down format menus to make unwanted and illegal format overrides. (More about that in a later blog.)

Versatile, structured books in FrameMaker 10

Recent releases of FrameMaker introduced the ability to add native XML or DITA files into a structured FrameMaker book. In fact, a structured FrameMaker book can contain a combination of structured and unstructured files. As per the screen capture below, it is not uncommon for FrameMaker 10 users to have all of a book’s chapters in native XML format, but use the unstructured FrameMaker file format for generated files like the TOC and Index, or Cover.

Why? Frankly, because it would be a royal pain to construct DTD and EDD definitions to allow for the relative free-form page layout that often occurs in book covers and front matter. There is another benefit to being able to add unstructured documents to a structured book that contains DITA/XML chapters. Sometimes documentation requires the addition of appendices or “back matter” in a book, late in the project’s life. Often these documents are not well-formed or well-suited to immediate conversion to DITA. Such unstructured files could demand considerable adjustments to both DTD and EDD, which could affect project delivery. Due to FrameMaker’s unique ability to mix unstructured with DITA/XML content in a book, it is possible to achieve satisfactory output with books which may contain transient, unstructured content that won’t be in the next version of the project.

Beyond the book, dita map in FrameMaker 10

Since FrameMaker 10 has been enhanced to support both DITA 1.1 and DITA 1.2, a dita map may be used instead of a book. In fact, FrameMaker 10 is so DITA compliant that you can open the complete sample that is provided with the DITA Open Toolkit.

The screen capture above shows FrameMaker 10 with the dita map and dita file contents that comprise the main sample in DITA Open Toolkit. No filters, file modifications, or “save as” were required to accomplish this. Any edits made to the content in FrameMaker 10 would be completely compliant with DITA Open toolkit.

More about DITA later

FrameMaker 10 is so far ahead of 7-year-old FrameMaker 7.2 in regards to DITA, that we could easily devote 5 or 6 blogs to this topic. Our final blogs will touch on some of the major aspects of DITA compliance in FrameMaker 10 that are completely lacking in FrameMaker 7.x.

In the meantime, we hope that this and previous blogs in this series have been persuasive enough to prompt you to take a closer look at FrameMaker 10, and take advantage of the heavily discounted upgrade path that will only be available for a few weeks.

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